The popularity of Microsoft Power BI has skyrocketed in recent years. The fact that more and more people use it can indicate its quality, reliability, and usability. Of course, affordability plays an important role. But it’s not the only reason why more and more people use Power BI. Power BI sets the standard for a data visualization tool, and offers robust features like data analysis expression (DAX) and more.
As a Power BI Consulting service, we at P3 have closely monitored these market trends. In this blog post, we’ll explain why Power BI is more popular than Tableau and compare Tableau vs Power BI.
Do More People Use Tableau Or Power BI?
Based on recent statistics, Power BI is more widely used than Tableau.
Gartner’s research shows that Power BI and Tableau are the first and second-most popular business intelligence tools on the market, respectively.
The exact numbers vary in various sources for Tableau vs Power BI market share. However, both Power BI and Tableau hover around 30% and 20%. And yes, it’s not a small gap.
What Is The Major Difference Between Power BI And Tableau?
Their major difference lies in their approach to data integration, transformation, and analysis.
- Data integration: Power BI is designed for diverse business environments. It provides a seamless way to connect to various business systems, extract the data, and transform it for analysis. This means gaining information from multiple data sources is never an issue. Tableau, on the other hand, assumes that your data comes from one source. You will need extra work to combine data from multiple sources in Tableau, which can be time-consuming. In addition, Tableau is owned by Salesforce. This might create conflicts when you want to integrate with a competitor’s platform.
- Data transformation: Power BI has Power Query, which is a powerful tool to handle ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) processes. In contrast, Tableau does not have a robust tool for ETL. You might require additional tools like Tableau Prep Builder for complex data transformation tasks.
- Data analysis: Power BI uses a data model concept that enables multi-system linkage, making it easy to answer many questions and build various dashboards. With Tableau, creating multiple dashboards can be time-consuming and repetitive. Why? Because you might need to repeat the same steps to join data from different sources for each new analysis.
Despite being less expensive, Power BI is considered more effective in practice. It is due to its comprehensive data integration, transformation, and analysis capabilities.
Which Is Easier, Power BI Or Tableau?
Both Tableau and Power BI are easy to get started with. They both offer user-friendly interfaces and are straightforward when it comes to creating data visualizations like reports or dashboards.
That being said, the more your business needs evolve, the less easy to use both platforms become. Tableau’s easy-to-use features tend to fall short as businesses grow, whereas Power BI can almost always address your needs.
In other words, Tableau is easy until it no longer gets the job done, while Power BI can always get the job done, but might require some more expertise. The good news is that there are Power BI consultants and experts out there (like us!) that can help!
Why Is Power BI More Popular Than Tableau?
Power BI’s popularity over Tableau can be attributed to several factors.
Price is one of them. The affordability of Power BI makes it the best choice for businesses of all sizes, especially for small and medium businesses. However, it’s not the only factor.
Power BI’s set of features, ease of use, agility, and seamless integration with Microsoft products are other important factors.
For a quick summary, here we provide a Power BI vs Tableau comparison matrix focusing on why Power BI is more popular.
If you’re looking for more about Power BI vs Tableau’s pros and cons, be sure to check our other article on Power BI vs Tableau.
Is Power BI Better Than Tableau?
While there is no such thing as a blanket answer, we believe that Power BI is better than Tableau.
With less price, you get more—Power BI offers more features and capabilities than Tableau for a lower cost.
How P3 Can Help with Data Visualization and More
We’ve explained why Power BI is more popular than Tableau. We also compared these two data visualization tools and found that Power BI is generally better than Tableau for data modeling.
If you or your team of data analysts are considering adopting Power BI for your business, our team at P3 can provide Power BI Consulting services tailored to your needs. With our assistance, you can leverage Power BI’s capabilities to drive your business forward.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you harness the power of your data with Power BI.
